The 3 Best Facebook Ad Features Right Now

When you think about all the ways you use Facebook, what is the one tool the makes a difference on Facebook right now?

Tough question right? And this could change depending on your role and your strengths when it comes to the platform.

To stay the number one social media platform, Facebook doesn’t have to keep up they have to continue to create. That means continuous updates and added features coming your way and it can become pretty easy to miss something, especially if you are not sure what new features you should be focusing on.

We wanted to answer the above question to ensure you knew what to spend your summer focusing on and where you should spend money testing before the big shopping seasons come into play.

Below we picked three Facebook features marketers, especially ones overseeing CPC Ads on Facebook, should be using!

1. Engagement Custom Audience

Facebook’s draw is their ability to give your brand access to billions of people, but as marketers, you know you don’t need to engage with everyone, you need to find that perfect audience ready to buy.

As great as it is to target people by interests, demographics, and pages liked, the real results come when you create an audience (or lookalike audiences) based on commitments your audience has already made with you. Those commitments could be when they sign up for your weekly newsletter, open an email, uses a coupon code, and now, thanks to Facebook, the actions people take on the ads you create on Facebook, your Facebook Page, or another type of interaction that happens between a user and brand on Facebook.

This newest targeting option, Engagement Custom Audiences, is a way for you to target the people who interact with your brand on Facebook. And as great as that feature is, in some ways the best part about this is that from their data, you can create a whole new audience, a lookalike audience. This allows you to find more people on Facebook who would also interact with your brand’s ad in a similar way. And for marketers, the most important component of creating any ad is ensuring the people seeing it take action, and this new feature ensures more of the right people see your ads!

2. Messenger ADs

There was a lot of talk during the 2016 F8 Conference about brands being allowed to create ads in Messenger, and now, over a year later, we have our answer. YES! You can send ads to users you have sent your Facebook Page a private message via Messenger within the last 365 days.

Over the past five years, Facebook has spent a lot of time on Messenger, so adding an ad component makes since. Messenger is how Facebook wants users to communicate, pay, plan, and shop, so the fact that brands can reach their audience in such a direct way is a powerful tool and another reason for Facebook users (and marketers) to keep using the Messenger app.

If you think about how your audience uses Messenger right now, you’ll realize this has become your main customer success channel. Maybe there are messages from people telling you how much they love your product or horror stories about poor customer service? Either way, this is how your audience is getting used to communicating with your brand, both good and bad, which means Messenger might be a more efficient way to communicate with them versus a phone call or email.

Now that you know you can place ads in Messenger, imagine sending previous unhappy customers (because of course, you have fixed their problem) a promo code for free shipping or 30% off their next order directly through Messenger. Giving them one last reason for a do-over and better yet having the data to see who, what and when someone opens that ad and uses that promo code.

3. Collections Ads

Collection Ads are Facebook’s way of giving your brand a little product catalog on their platform. You can feature different items from your website and your Facebook audience can shop directly on Facebook without having to leave the social site.

Why is this important? Because people spend a lot of time on Facebook, the kind of time you wish they would spend on your site, spending money. By bringing your site to them, in a place they are already spending a lot of time makes a lot of sense! Why, yes it’s always best to get them directly to your site it is harder than ever to compete with the time they have to do it. This newest feature could be the next best thing if they convert (and spend money)!

Wrap It Up

What have been your favorite Facebook updates?

Or the most impactful for your business?

Facebook continues to give us new, and effective ways, to spend our ad budgets and as long as they continue to work I don’t think we will see a shortage of new features to try!

Sure there are other updates like Facebook Stories, the clean up the Newsfeed and new Facebook Group features but when it comes to ads Facebook knows what it’s doing and the marketers who know how to use their tools will benefit from these features the most.

Want more help with your social strategy? Then download our FREE e-book, 3o Social Tests here!